For months Arena languished, more an idea than an actual game, but the concept was that you played as a gladiator in a fantasy empire called Tamriel where teams competed in coliseums for fame and fortune. Nowadays, we could build on an engine like Unreal or Unity, but if you wanted working technology back then you had to build it yourself.
When I first joined Bethesda, Arena was on the backburner while we developed a 3D engine for it. In later years, I worked on some big budget, big team projects and when they crash and burn, which they sometimes do, it’s not as easy to dust yourself off and move on to the next project. There are 17 people listed in the credits for Arena, but most of us were part-time, splitting our 80-hour-a-week work hours between two or three other projects during the same period. We had very short development times and very small teams. I had been hired on at Bethesda only about a year and a half before, with zero experience in making games, and by the time Arena came out, it was the third game I had released. We simply moved on to the next project, not thinking there’d be a sequel let alone a series. Remember, this was in an era where you didn’t download your game from Steam, you bought it at a brick and mortar game store, and if it wasn’t on the shelves in time for Black Friday and the holidays, you would only get a fraction of the sales you needed.
The full title was The Elder Scrolls, Chapter 1: Arena actually, which suggests we anticipated that it would be a series, but that was wishful thinking more than anything. It’s been 25 years since the first Elder Scrolls game which we titled Arena was released.
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